“I’ve made a very conscious effort to train myself in the visual tradition of the church. I’m stocking my head with the symbols that Christian artists have used to portray the mystery visually.”

Jane Redmont is the author of When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Everyday Life (HarperCollins, 1999), a readable and wide-ranging exploration of the practice of prayer in modern lives. Jane is part journalist and part theologian (she is now an assistant professor of religious studies at Guilford College), and her books are always woven together using threads of case studies, life stories, interviews, and reportage. When In Doubt, now out of print, is a little bit like a printed episode of This American Life on the topic of prayer, in which you meet all sorts of people who tell you about their prayer lives.

One of the people you meet in the book is me, because Jane is a friend of mine from grad school days in Berkeley, when (in addition to studying for our doctorates) I was drawing comic books and Jane was working on this book. My wife Susan and I both get nice thank yous in the preface. There were three different topics in the life of prayer that Jane interviewed me about: the use of images, the role of praise, and memorizing Scripture.

Images and prayer make a funny combination for most evangelical Protestants, and that includes me. In the overall flow of the chapter (on “Gazing”), my point of view is introduced fairly late, after a Greek Orthodox historian (hi Jim!), a latina Roman Catholic theologian talking about the virgin of Guadalupe (hi Nancy!), and a scholar whose interdisciplinary work has focused on this exact topic (hi Margaret!). So I show up among all these iconophiles as the Protestant who’s more than a little bit squeamish about the religious use of pictures, but who has properly evangelical reasons for bringing visual experience into the presence of God. Need I add that When in Doubt, Sing is not mainly addressed to an evangelical audience? But Jane’s the best sort of liberal, and gladly made room for my point of view along with the rest.

Here is what I said on the subject of images in Jane’s book, When In Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life, pages 80-83. (more… )